Inspiration, ideas and information to help women build public speaking content, confidence and credibility. Denise Graveline is a Washington, DC-based speaker coach who has coached nearly 200 TEDMED and TEDx speakers--including one of 2016's most popular TED talks. She also has prepared speakers for presentations, testimony, and keynotes. She offers 1:1 coaching and group workshops in public speaking, presentation and media interview skills to both men and women.

Friday, March 4, 2016

When you have a treasure trove as large as The Eloquent Woman Index of Famous Women's Speeches, you can use it as a lens on the topic of women and public speaking. For Women's History Month, I've collected 39 speeches that occurred 50 years ago or earlier from the Index, and the group demonstrates interesting themes in the history of women and speaking.

You'll notice a big gap--nearly 300 years--between the earliest speech in the Index by Queen Elizabeth I in 1588 and Sojourner Truth's "Ain't I a Woman?" speech in 1851, and that's no mistake: For many of those years, women in many cultures were forbidden to speak in public. "History has many themes," wrote Kathleen Hall Jamieson. "One of them is that women should be quiet."

It was still rare for women to speak publicly in the 1800s and the following decades, but more publicly acceptable in Western cultures for them to speak about issues like temperance, slavery and religion. That's what makes some of the Index speeches from this era so remarkable, because they ignored social conventions to speak about lynching, war crimes, free love, anti-war themes, and yes, votes for women, the right that would help women gain authority to speak on other issues. Later in this collection, you'll see women enter new spheres: politics, science, human rights and television. This grouping from The Eloquent Woman Index includes women speakers from Argentina, Australia, Canada, Denmark, Egypt, England, Ireland, Poland, and the United States.

Dip into this collection and share it with other women and girls. Clicking through the links will take you to text, video or audio (where available), along with what you can learn as a public speaker from these famous speeches. I've updated this list to include posts on the Index through 2016.

1588: Elizabeth I's speech to the troops at Tilbury, a rare battleground speech by a great queen. We have three versions of it, none of them from her own time, so this one likely was rewritten and it's unlikely she actually said these stirring words.

1909:Ida B. Wells "This Awful Slaughter" came at the first convention of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, taking on lynching directly at a time when it was rarely spoken of publicly.

In the same year, Marie Curie's 1911 Nobel lecture--for her second Nobel Prize--was careful to take full credit for her contributions to her science, as men who spoke about her did not.

1912:Mother Jones speaks to striking West Virginia miners in her trademark "hell-raiser" style, giving voice to their working conditions. The only reason we have the text is because the mine owners hired a stenographer to take it down, hoping to prove Jones was a violent danger.

1914:Nellie McClung's "Should Men Vote?" tweaked the nose of Canada's male politicians, turning around their words about why women should not get the vote in a funny mock debate that turned the tide for women's votes in that country.

1962:Frances Perkins on the roots of Social Security was a lookback speech from the first female Secretary of Labor in the U.S., who was present for Rose Schneiderman's Triangle Fire speech, a lasting influence in her own efforts to help the working class.

Also in 1964,Lady Bird Johnson's whistlestop tour took place in town after town before U.S. southerners angry at her husband's signing of the civil rights legislation. Grace under pressure doesn't begin to describe it.